The Philosophy of Plotinus

by

William Ralph Inge

(1917)

Longmans, Green and Co.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface to the Third Edition Preface to the First Edition Introductory The Third Century Forerunners of Plotinus The World of Sense The Soul () Immortality of the Soul The Spiritual World The Absolute Ethics, Religion, and sthetics Concluding Reflections

Preface to the Third Edition

IN preparing this final edition for the press, I have read through the whole of the Enneads again. I have also revised my book throughout, and have made some hundreds of small corrections and alterations.

A good deal of work has been done upon Plotinus in the last ten years. Professors Dodds and Sleeman have published a large number of textual emendations, some of which are important as clearing up obscurities caused by errors in the manuscripts. In spite of all that has been done to remove such errors, the text of Plotinus is still faulty in many places.

Of recent books on the philosophy of Plotinus, the most important is that of Fritz Heinemann (Platin, Leipzig, 1921). Heinemann claims not only to have restored the chronological order in which the different parts of the Enneads were written, but to have discovered considerable interpolations, which he ascribes to friends and disciples of the philosopher. He also asserts that the doctrine of Plotinus changed materially between the earliest and the latest parts of his book. In the earlier chapters he cannot find the characteristic Plotinian doctrine of the One. I have tried to judge this theory on its merits, but I am not convinced. It is unlikely a, priori that a thinker who wrote nothing before the age of fifty, and died sixteen years later, should have altered his views on fundamental questions as he went on. Nor do I find anything more than a slight change of emphasis. On the Problem of Evil it might be possible to find contradictions between earlier and later books; but I do not think that Plotinus ever dealt confidently with this problem. On the whole, I agree with Arnou, that la doctrine est bien la mme dans tous les livres.

Another book which I have found valuable is Ren Arnou, Le Dsir de Dieu dans la Philosophie de Plotin (Paris). N. O. Lossky, The World as an Organic Whole (Oxford, 1928), is interesting as a modern philosophic work avowedly based on the Enneads.

Mr. Whittaker has brought out an enlarged edition of his admirable book The Neoplatonists. Mr. Stephen Mackenna has now translated the whole of the Enneads except the Sixth Book. The later volumes confirm the high opinion which I formed of his work after reading the first. I earnestly hope that he will endure to the completion of his labour of love. I have profited by some of Professor Taylor's criticisms of the first edition in Mind (1919).

There has been, I rejoice to observe, a great change in the estimate of Plotinus as a philosopher. Some of the errors against which I protested ten years ago are seldom any longer repeated, and it is now more generally recognised that he is one of the greatest names in the history of philosophy. Professor Dodds little book, Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism (S.P.C.K., 1923), is very sound, and will be helpful to students beginning the subject.

My method of treating my subject was necessarily determined by the conditions of the Gifford Lectureship; this has been forgotten by one or two critics. But I was glad to be obliged to treat Neoplatonism as a living, not as a dead, philosophy; for so I believe it to be. In choosing so to deal with it, some parts of the Enneads seemed to me more vital than others. I could not, for example, include a detailed discussion of the Categories in the Sixth Ennead. I wish the book to be regarded as a contribution to the philosophy of religion, rather than a treatise on general metaphysics. My last reading of Plotinus has only confirmed me in my conviction that his value as a religious philosopher can hardly be over-estimated. I know no more powerful defence of the religious view of life, which bids us pass through things temporal in the spirit of a worshipper, to use a phrase of Bishop Gore's. Plotinus sets himself to prove dialectically, as a Platonist must attempt to do, the soundness of the upward track which he is treading in his inward experience. He names the rungs on Jacob's ladder, but, as I have said, his view of reality is much rather a picture of a continuous spectrum, in which the colours merge into each other, unseparated by any hard lines. Most of the waverings and apparent contradictions which schematists have found in the Enneads are thus to be accounted for.

For him, the good life itself is its own reward, and we must look for no other. He disdains the threats and promises of ecclesiasticism. His profound

indifference to worldly affairs and the problems of civilisation puts the modern spirit out of sympathy with him; but is not this indifference also characteristic of the Gospels? The riddle of the Sphinx for the twentieth century is how to preserve what is true and noble in the idea of evolutionary progress, without secularising our religion and losing our hold on the unchanging perfection of God. This problem was not so insistent either in the first century or in the third. Plotinus will teach us that there can be no evolution except in relation to a timeless background which does not itself evolve. This is, of course, the Christian view, and I believe it will vindicate itself against the rival view of a Deity who is vitally involved in the fortunes of His creatures.

W. R. INGE.

DEANERY, ST. PAUL'S. June 1928.

Preface to the First Edition

THE Gifford Lectureships have given many English and some foreign scholars the pleasantest of introductions to the life of the Scottish Universities. The unique charm of St. Andrews is but half realised by those who only know it as the Mecca of the golfer. Those who have had the privilege of being admitted to the academic society of the ancient city will understand why Andrew Lang confessed that even Oxford had a successful rival in his affections. The present writer will always look back upon his two visits to St. Andrews as the brightest interlude in four sad years.

It is my agreeable duty to acknowledge the help which I have received from several friends. I have been encouraged and gratified by the interest in my lectures shown by those two distinguished Platonists, Professors Burnet and Taylor, of St. Andrews. For several years I have received the kindest sympathy in my philosophical studies from Lord Haldane. Three Oxford friends have been good enough to read my book in manuscript or in the proof-sheets: Captain Ross, Fellow of Oriel; the Rev. H, H. Williams, D.D., Principal of St. Edmund Hall; and Mr. C. C. J. Webb, Fellow of Magdalen and at present Gifford Lecturer at Aberdeen.

Introductory

THE honour which the University of St. Andrews has conferred upon me has given me the opportunity of delivering in the form of lectures the substance of a book on which I have worked, with many interruptions, for about seventeen years. My interest in Plotinus began while I was writing my Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism, which I gave at Oxford in 1899. Mysticism is a very wide subject, and the name has been used more loosely even than Socialism. We are unable in English to mark that distinction between the higher and the lower kinds of mysticism, which the Germans indicate when they call the one Mystik and the other Mystizismus. To many persons a mystic is a dreamer who takes a detached and unpractical view of life. Others suppose the essence of mysticism to be the search for loose types of things through all degrees, as if nature were a divine cryptogram, the key to which is furnished through some kind of occultism. The Roman Catholic Church associates the word closely with what are called mystical phenomena, those strange experiences of the cloistered ascetic which that Church ascribes to the direct agency of supernatural powers, benign or maleficent, and which modern psychology believes to be purely subjective and for the most part pathological. There are few stranger things in literature than the semi-official Roman Catholic books on mystical theology, compiled with great learning and a show of scientific method, but consisting largely of cases of levitation, incandescence, transverberation, visions and auditions of every kind, which the mystics of the cloister, many of whom have been canonised as saints, have recorded as their own experiences. The main task for the theologians and spiritual directors who collect these cases is not to establish the objective reality of these phenomena, which is taken for granted, but to show how divine mysticism may be distinguished from diabolical imitations of it. It is, however, only fair to say that the wisest of the Catholic writers on mysticism discourage the tendency to attach great importance to miraculous favours and temptations. These experiences are a subsidiary and not indispensable part of the great mystic quest, which is the journey of the Soul, by an inner ascent, to the presence of God and to immediate union with Him. The stages of this

ascent are mapped out with the same precision as the supernatural visitations above mentioned, and these records of the Soul's progress have a recognised value for psychologists as well as for divines. Although much importance must be allowed to the effects of suggestion in all matters of religious experience, the books of the medieval mystics have great value as first-hand evidence of the normal progress of the inner life when the mind and will are wholly concentrated upon the vision and knowledge of God. The close agreement which we find in these records, written in different countries, in different ages, and even by adherents of different creeds (for Asia has here its own important contribution to make) can only be accounted for if we hold that the mystical experience is a genuine part of human nature, which may be developed, like the arts, by concentrated attention and assiduous labour, and which assumes the same general forms whenever and wherever it is earnestly sought.

There are some students of mysticism who are content to investigate the subject as a branch of psychology. They examine and tabulate the states of mind described in mystical writings, without raising the question what degree of intrinsic value or truth they possess. This is the right attitude for a scientific psychologist to take. But it is not the right attitude for one who wishes to understand the mystics. We cannot understand them as long as we confine ourselves within the limits which psychology, which is an abstract science, is obliged to accept. Mysticism is the pursuit of ultimate, objective truth, or it is nothing. What the world calls mysticism, says Coventry Patmore, is the science of ultimates, the science of self-evident reality. Not for one moment can it rest content with that neutrality or agnosticism with regard to the source and validity of its intuitions, which the psychologist, as such, is pledged to maintain. For psychology is a branch of natural science. It may be denned as the science of behaviour, or as that part of physiology from which the physiologist is self-excluded by his assumption that all vital functions can be explained mechanically. The mystic is not interested in the states of his consciousness. He cares very little whether he is conscious or unconscious, in the body or out of the body. But he is supremely interested in knowing God, and, if possible, in seeing Him face to face. His inner life is not an intensive cultivation of the emotions. It develops by means of what the later Greek

philosophy calls the dialectic, which Plotinus defines as the method and discipline which brings with it the power of pronouncing with final truth upon the nature and relation of things, also the knowledge of the Good and of its opposite, of the eternal and of the temporal. This knowledge gained, the dialectic, now freed from all deceit and falsehood, pastures the Soul in the meadows of truth; it has a clear vision of the eternal Ideas, and points the way to the supreme Unity that lies behind them. Then at last, and not before, it rests, leaving behind the operation of the discursive reason and contemplating the One who is also the Good.

I am well aware that this philosophy runs counter to a very strong current in contemporary thought. It is possible to write a book on the philosophy of religion, as Hffding has done, in which the three parts are epistemology, psychology, and ethics, that is to say, the science of knowledge, the science of mental states, and the science of conduct, without touching on the question which to the Platonist seemed the necessary starting-point and the necessary goal of the whole inquirythe question, What is ultimate reality? But when I observe what this popular relativism has made of religion and philosophy; when I see that it has helped to break down the barriers which divide fact from fancy, knowledge from superstition, I am confirmed in my conviction that when the philosophy of religion forsakes its old loving nurse the Platonic philosophy (to quote one of the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century), it is in danger of tailing from its high estate, and playing into the hands of those who are willing to exploit the superstitions of the vulgar. Pragmatism is defenceless against obscurantism; the Gospel for human needs rehabilitates those half-suppressed thought-habits which are older and more tenacious than civilisation.

Thus it soon became clear to me that mysticism involves a philosophy and at bottom is a philosophy. Although it never leaves the pathway of individual and concrete experience, it values that experience precisely as being not merely subjective, not merely individual, but a revelation of universal and eternal truth. And while the intelligence itself is continually enriched and strengthened by the experiences which come to it, so that it changes progressively in correspondence with the growth of its knowledge, it is never

a passive spectator of the energies of the will and the raptures of the emotions, but on the contrary is ever active, co-ordinating, sifting, and testing the whole content of experience, and maintaining a mental discipline not less arduous and not less fruitful than the moral discipline which accompanies it.

Mysticism is a spiritual philosophy which demands the concurrent activity of thought, will, and feeling. It assumes from the outset that these three elements of our personality, which in real life are never sundered from each other, point towards the same goal, and if rightly used will conduct us thither. Further, it holds that only by the consecration of these three faculties in the service of the same quest can a man become effectively what he is potentially, a partaker of the Divine nature and a denizen of the spiritual world. There is no special organ for the reception of Divine or spiritual truth, which is simply the knowledge of the world as it really is. Some are better endowed with spiritual gifts than others, and are called to ascend greater heights; but the power which leads us up the pathway to reality and blessedness is, as Plotinus says, one which all possess, though few use it.

This power is emphatically not a mere susceptibility to passionate or rapturous emotion. Mysticism has indeed been defined as an extension of the mind to God by means of the longing of love; and there is nothing to quarrel with in this definition. But it is the Spirit in love of Plotinus, the amor intellectualis Dei of Spinoza, which draws us upward. It is the whole personality, unified and harmonised under the leadership of what the Stoics called the ruling faculty, that enters the holy of holies. There are some admirers of the mystics who speak as if the intellect were an intruder and almost an obstacle in the life of holiness. Against such I will be content to quote the words of one of our foremost theologians, the Roman Catholic layman, Baron Friedrich von Hgel. It is impossible to see why, simply because of their superior intellectual gifts and development, men like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Cassian and Duns Scotus, Nicholas of Goes and Pascal, Rosmini and Newman, should count as necessarily less near to God and Christ, than others with fewer of these gifts and opportunities. For it is not as though such gifts were considered as ever of themselves constituting any moral or spiritual worth. Nothing can be more certain than that great

mental powers can be accompanied by emptiness or depravity of heart. The identical standard is to be applied to these as to all other gifts: they are not to be considered as substitutes, but only as additional material and means for the moral and spiritual life; and it is only inasmuch as they are actually so used, that they can effectively help on sanctity itself. It is only contended here that such gifts do furnish additional means and materials for the devoted will- and grace-moved soul, towards the richest and deepest spiritual life. For the intellectual virtues are no mere empty name: candour, moral courage, intellectual honesty, scrupulous accuracy, chivalrous fairness, endless docility to facts, disinterested collaboration, unconquerable hopefulness and perseverance, manly renunciation of popularity and easy honours, love of bracing labour and strengthening solitude; these and many other cognate qualities bear upon them the impress of God and His Christ. And yet they all find but a scanty field of development outside the intellectual life. The same writer makes, as it seems to me, a most acute comment on the influence which Realism and Nominalism have respectively exercised upon the intellectual factor in religion. Whereas, he says, during the prevalence of Realism, affective, mystical religion is the concomitant and double of intellectual religion, during the later prevalence of Nominalism, Mysticism becomes the ever-increasing supplement, and at last evermore largely the substitute, for the methods of reasoning. In other words, it is the alliance of mysticism with that great school of thought which can be traced back to Plato, which saves it from Schwrmerei and the vagaries of unchecked emotionalism. The contemplation of the Platonic mystic is only what St. Paul means when he says, I will pray with the Spirit and I will pray with the understanding also.

Such being the truth about the mystical element in religion, as I was led by my studies to believe, I was naturally brought to pay special attention to the great thinker who must be, for all time, the classical representative of mystical philosophy. No other mystical thinker even approaches Plotinus in power and insight and profound spiritual penetration. I have steeped myself in his writings ever since, and I have tried not only to understand them, as one might try to understand any other intellectual system, but to take them, as he assuredly wished his readers to take them, as a guide to right living and right

thinking. There is no Greek philosopher who did not intend to be an ethical teacher; and in Plotinus the fusion of religion, ethics, and metaphysics is almost complete. He must be studied as a spiritual director, a prophet and not only a thinker. His is one of the most ambitious of all philosophical systems, for he not only attempts to unite and reconcile what was best in all Greek philosophy, but he claims to have found the way of deliverance and salvation for the soul of man, in whatever circumstances he may be placed. And, as he is never tired of telling us, we can only understand him by following him, and making his experience our own. The quest is for him who will undergo the discipline and follow the gleam. Spiritual things, as St. Paul says, are spiritually discerned; the carnal mind, however quick in apprehending the appearances of the world of sense, cannot know the things of the Spirit. We can only judge of what is akin to ourselves. He says: As it is not for those to speak of the beauties of the material world who have never seen them or known themmen born blind, for instance, so must those be silent about the beauty of noble conduct and knowledge, who have never cared for such things; nor may those tell of the splendour of virtue who have never known the face of justice and temperance, beautiful beyond the beauty of the morning and evening star. There is much in philosophy (so Plato himself felt) that cannot be explained in words. In his Seventh Epistle, which I think, with Professor Burnet, we may accept as genuine, he declares his intention of publishing nothing on what he must have regarded as the crown of his philosophy, the Idea of the Good. There is no writing of mine on this subject, nor ever shall be. It is not capable of expression like other branches of study; but as the result of long intercourse and a common life spent upon the thing, a light is suddenly kindled as from a leaping spark, and when it has reached the Soul, it thenceforward finds nutriment for itself. I know this at any rate, that if these things were to be written down or stated at all, they would be better stated by myself than by others, and I know too that I should be the person to suffer most by their being badly set down in writing. If I thought that they could be adequately written down and stated to the world, what finer occupation could I have had in life than to write what would be of great service to mankind, and to reveal Nature in the light of day to all men? But I do not even think the effort to attain this a good thing for man, except for the very

few who can be enabled to discover these things themselves by means of a brief indication. The rest it would either fill with contempt in a manner by no means pleasing, or with a lofty and vain presumption as though they had learnt something grand. So in the Timaeus he says, To find the Father and Maker of this universe is a hard task; and when you have found him, it is impossible to speak of him before all people. We find exactly the same feeling in Clement, who is important as illustrating the methods of teaching philosophy at Alexandria in the generation before Plotinus. To write down everything in a book, he says in the Stromateis, is as bad as putting a sword into the hand of a child. The safest thing is not to write at all, but to learn and teach orally; for what is written remains. The disciplina arcani of the Christian Platonists probably consisted in an allegorical and philosophical interpretation of certain historical dogmas; but there was also the perfectly legitimate feeling that spiritual teaching is for the spiritually minded; and this is the motive of such reticence as we find in Plotinus. Plotinus himself learnt the duty of reticence from Ammonius; and we must remember this principle in dealing with any mystical philosopher. Even St. Paul had seen in a vision things unlawful to utter; and Samuel Johnson blames Jacob Bhme for not following the apostle's example in refraining from attempts to utter the unutterable. Nevertheless I do not think that Plotinus has suppressed anything except the indescribable. The Enneads are notes of conferences held with the inner circle of his disciples.

My study of Plotinus has therefore been, by necessity, a moral as well as an intellectual discipline. And I have not found that he fails his disciples in good fortune or in evil. Like Wordsworth, he is an author whom a man may take up in trouble and perplexity, with the certainty of finding strength and consolation. He dwells in a region where the provoking of all men and the strife of tongues cannot annoy us; his citadel is impregnable even when the slings and arrows of fortune are discharged against ourselves or our country. For he insists that spiritual goods alone are real; he demonetises the world's currency as completely as the Gospels themselves. The good life is always within our power; and if a man seeks from the good life anything beyond itself, it is not the good life that he is seeking. It is a severe utterance; but there is what Emerson calls a tart cathartic virtue in it, which is bracing

when we are battling through a storm. I have found him, I say, a wise and inspiring spiritual guide; and if I have also found his philosophy intellectually satisfying, it is partly because a religious philosophy must satisfy religious needs as well as speculative difficulties. The two cannot really be separated, unless we try to divide our minds into water-tight compartments, which is unnecessary, since we are in no danger of being torpedoed in this voyage.

It is a satisfaction to me to know that in thus confessing myself to be a disciple and not merely a student and critic of the philosopher whose system I have undertaken to expound, I am in harmony with the intentions of the founder of this lectureship, as expressed in the deed of foundation. He wished his lecturers to study the nature of the supreme Reality, within which we live and move and have our being. He wished them to consider the duty and destiny of man, determined by his relations with the powers above him. And he desired that the knowledge to which these studies may lead us shall be a knowledge that is our own, not depending on any external special revelation, nor enjoined by any sacrosanct authority. To such knowledge Plotinus promises to conduct us, and his last word to us is, Remember that there are parts of what it most concerns you to know which I cannot describe to you; you must come with me and see for yourselves. The vision is for him who will see it.

The great constructive effort of Neoplatonism, in which the speculations of seven hundred years are summed up, and after which the longest period of unimpeded thinking which the human race has yet been permitted to enjoy soon reached its end, is of very great importance in the history both of philosophy and of theology. Historically, this is what Platonism came to be; this is the point at which it reached its full growthits or , as Aristotle would say, and then stopped. The Neoplatonic philosophy underwent no further development of importance after Plotinus, but it absorbed into itself most of the rival theories which had flourished alongside of it, so that it seemed to later students to have unified Plato and Aristotle, and the Stoics to boot. But its later history, from an earlier date than the closing of the Athenian schools of philosophy by Justinian in 529, must be sought not among the crumbling ruins of Hellenism, but within the Christian

Church. If it be true, as Eunapius said, that the fire still burns on the altars of Plotinus, it is because Christian theology became Neoplatonic. This involved no violent changes. From the time when the new religion crossed over into Europe and broke the first mould into which it had flowed, that of apocalyptic Messianism, its affinity with Platonism was incontestable. St. Paul's doctrines of Christ as the Power and the Wisdom of God; of the temporal things that are seen and the eternal things that are invisible; his theory of the resurrection, from which flesh and blood are excluded, since gross matter cannot inherit the Kingdom of God; and his psychology of body, soul, and spirit, in which, as in the Platonists, Soul holds the middle place, and Spirit is nearly identical with the Platonic all show that Christianity no sooner became a European religion than it discovered its natural affinity with Platonism. The remarkable verse in 2 Corinthians, We all with unveiled face reflecting like mirrors the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, is pure Neoplatonism. The Fourth Gospel develops this Pauline Platonism, and the Prologue to the Gospel expounds it in outline. One of the Pagan Platonists said that this Prologue ought to be written in letters of gold. The Christian writers of the three generations after the Johannine books are, on the intellectual side, less interesting; but from the beginning of the third century we have an avowed school of Christian Platonism at Alexandria, which lives for us in the writings of that charming man of letters, Clement, and in the voluminous works of Origen, the most learned Biblical scholar of his time. After this, Greek Christianity remained predominantly Neoplatonic; Gregory of Nyssa and Basil are full of echoes of Plotinus and his school. With Augustine Latin theology follows the same path. Plotinus, read in a Latin translation, was the schoolmaster who brought Augustine to Christ. There is therefore nothing startling in the considered opinion of Rudolf Eucken, that Plotinus has influenced Christian theology more than any other thinker (since St. Paul, he should no doubt have added). From the time of Augustine to the present day, Neoplatonism has always been at home in the Christian Church. The thoughts of Plotinus were revived and popularised in Bothius, long a favourite author with medieval students; his spirit lives again in Scotus Erigena and Eckhart; and the philosophy of Proclus (or perhaps rather of Damascius, the contemporary of the writer) was

invested with semi-apostolic authority when the treatises of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, which seem to have been written under his influence, were ascribed to St. Paul's Athenian convert. The Arabs included some Neoplatonic treatises in their Aristotelian collection, and through them another rivulet from the same source came back into European philosophy, and influenced the theology of the schoolmen. It is impossible that a union thus early formed and so frequently cemented can ever be dissolved. Platonism is part of the vital Christian theology, with which no other philosophy, I venture to say, can work without friction. It is gratifying to me to find that Troeltsch, one of the deepest thinkers in Germany, has said that the future of Christian philosophy depends on the renewal of its alliance with Neoplatonism.

If this is so, the neglect with which the Enneads have been treated is not a little surprising. In most of our Universities where Greek philosophy is studied (I can speak at any rate for Oxford and Cambridge), it has been almost assumed that nothing later than the Stoics and Epicureans is worthy of attention. Some histories of ancient philosophy end earlier still. The result is that a very serious gap seems to yawn between Hellenic and Christian philosophy, a gap which does not really exist. There were quarrels between Christian and Pagan philosophers, but they were based mainly on violent prejudices with which intellectual differences had not much to do; for neither in philosophy nor in ethics were the differences very great. It is therefore regrettable that students of Greek philosophy should think it natural to ignore Christian thought, and that students of Christian dogma should often have no intimate knowledge of Greek philosophy. An example of this limitation is furnished by a very famous book, Harnack's History of Dogma. Professor Harnack is one of the most learned men in Europe, and his survey of the whole field of Christian speculation and dogmatic controversy is admitted to be masterly; but he has little or no sympathy with Greek philosophy, and does not seem to be very well acquainted with it. Neither his article on Neoplatonism in the Encyclopdia Britannica nor his chapter on the subject in the first volume of the History of Dogma seems to me worthy of its author. He regards the Hellenic element in Christianity with unmistakable impatience and irritation; it is for him, one may almost say, an unwelcome intruder.

Other German theologians, who belong without qualification to the Ritschlian school (which cannot be said of Harnack himself) show this animus with no disguise; and the Catholic Modernists, in spite of their quarrel with Liberal Protestantism, see in the Christian Platonists only the spiritual fathers of their bte noire. St. Thomas Aquinas. We have thus to face a revolt against Platonism both in Protestant and Catholic theology. Those who sympathise with this anti-Hellenic movement are not likely to welcome my exhortations to read Plotinus. But if they would do so, they would understand better the real continuity between the old culture and the new religion, and they might realise the utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces. The Galilean Gospel, as it proceeded from the lips of Christ, was doubtless unaffected by Greek philosophy; it was essentially the consummation of the Jewish prophetic religion. But the Catholic Church from its very beginning was formed by a confluence of Jewish and Hellenic religious ideas, and it would not be wholly untrue to say that in religion as in other things Grcia capta ferum victorem cepit. Catholicism, as Troeltsch says, is the last creative achievement of classical culture. The civilisation of the Empire, on its moral and religious side, expired in giving birth to the Catholic Church, just as on the political side the Caesars of the West handed over their sceptre, not so much to the Holy Roman Emperors as to the priestly Caesar on the Vatican.

I regret that the scope of these lectures cannot be enlarged so as to include a survey of the development of Christian Platonism. Valuable books on the subject already exist; but none of them, so far as I know, treats this school of Christian thought as a continuation, under changed conditions, of the latest phase of Greek philosophy. The assumption is that the Christian religion may be traced from the Old Testament Scriptures, through the canonical books of the New Testament, and so to the Councils of the Catholic Church. This is like tracing a pedigree from one parent only, for the Hellenic element in the New Testament is usually almost ignored.

To the student of historical evolution, whether in the political sphere or in the growth of ideas, the great interest of this period is the reciprocal influence of East upon West, and of West upon East. The classical civilisation was driven

in self-defence to import certain alien elements which properly belong to the East, and which are exotic to that type of culture which was developed on the shores of the Mediterranean. The ancient system of self-governing city states, with their vivid social and intellectual life, and their devotion to art, science, and letters, was too weak to withstand the menace of northern barbarism. The empire of Augustus became inevitable from the time when the Republic was driven to suspend constitutional forms and empower Gaius Marius to raise a professional army. The fate of liberty was sealed when, after a century of military revolutions and pronunciamientos, the Empire was centralised and turned into a Sultanate by Diocletian. The establishment of a State Church, from which it was penal to dissent, followed as a necessary part of this Orientalising of Europe. The change was easier because the free Mediterranean races had long been declining in numbers and energy. But neither absolutism nor Csaro-papism belongs to the natural evolution of European civilisation. It was no accident that as soon as political conditions permitted the rise of free cities in Italy and elsewhere, the study of classical culture began again where it had been dropped a thousand years before. From that time to this our civilisation has been inspired by Grco-Roman ideas, kept alive by the fragments of the old literature which fortunately survived through the Dark Ages. The continuity of thought has been less broken than that of political and religious institutions. Catholic theology has stood firmly by its ancient philosophical tradition, and has kept it alive and active. As long as St. Thomas Aquinas is the norm of scientific orthodoxy, the philosophy of the Church must remain predominantly Neoplatonic.

The neglect of Plotinus himself, in spite of the immense influence of his teaching, is partly accounted for by the reluctance of ecclesiastics to acknowledge obligations to a Pagan, who was the master of that formidable anti-Christian apologist, Porphyry. But it is partly due to the extreme difficulty of reading the Enneads in the original. The obscurities of his style baffle at first even a good Greek scholar, and the arrangement is chaotic. We have in fact only isolated conferences in the Seminr of Plotinus, in which some particular difficulty is discussed. Hence endless repetition, and often the impression of keen young students heckling their professor. In one place (5. 5. 6) you have said is allowed to stand. When after much labour the student

has become familiar with the mannerisms of the author, he has his reward. The sustained elevation of thought; the intense honesty of the man, who never shirks a difficulty or writes an insincere word; the deep seriousness which makes him disdain all ornament and fine writing, but frequently moves him to real eloquence by the grandeur of his intellectual visions; the beauty of holiness which pervades even the abstruse parts of the dialectic, produce a profound impression on those who have given themselves time to surmount the initial difficulties of reading the Enneads. But these difficulties are certainly formidable, and they have in fact deterred many who would have found the labour well repaid. It has not hitherto been possible to read Plotinus in a really good translation. There is a Latin version by Marsilio Ficino, the well-known Renaissance Scholar (1492). The enthusiastic English Platonist, Thomas Taylor, published partial translations between 1787 and 1834. The volume, which was first issued in 1817, has been edited by Mr. G. R. S. Mead in Bohn's Series. It is very useful to the English reader, but is incomplete and not immaculate in scholarship. Bouillet's French translation (1857) has long been out of print. It contains the whole of the Enneads, with valuable notes, introductions, and appendices. As a translation it has the merit of being always lucid and readable, and the demerit of being often inaccurate. Mller (1878) has translated the whole with great care into very crabbed German. In 1905 another German, Otto Kiefer, published a translation of selected portions, which I have not seen, but which Drews praises for its style. But in the near future it will be possible for any English student to make the acquaintance of Plotinus in an excellent English version. This we shall owe to the devoted labour of Mr. Stephen Mackenna, who is translating the whole into admirably clear and vigorous English. The most convenient Greek text is that of Volkmann, in the Teubner Series, 18834. He and other editors have done something to clear the text of corruptions, but several passages are mutilated beyond repair.

The literature of Neoplatonism is extensive. Three works in Frenchthose of Matter (1817), Jules Simon (1845), and Vacherot (1846)are still worth studying, though in some important points I have found them unsatisfactory, especially in their disposition to find un-Hellenic elements in Plotinus. They are all excellently written. A more recent French work, Chaignet's Histoire de

la Psychologie des Grecs (1887), in five volumes, seems to me very sound but not very brilliant. The fourth volume is devoted to Plotinus. There is a large number of German monographs. I have consulted, with varying degrees of profit, those of Steinhart (1840), Kirchner (1854), and Richter (1867), as well as the well-known work of Zeller, whose citations I have found more valuable than his interpretation of them. The pages of Ueberweg-Heinze and of the Real-Encyclopdie which deal with the subject are useful. Hartmann's comments on Plotinus are good; and his disciple, Arthur Drews, has published a book called Plotin (1907), which contains valuable criticism, though he is too anxious to find Hartmann's Unconscious in Neoplatonism. Essays in German and French on the influence of Plotinus upon Augustine and Basil have also been consulted. Rudolf Eucken has afairly long discussion of Plotinus in his Lebensanschauungen Grosser Denker, which marks an advance on earlier criticisms of the philosophy. Eucken fully recognises the great importance of Plotinus in the history of thought, and especially of Christian thought; but he has not escaped the common error of finding metaphysical dualism in Plotinus, and he has not understood the doctrines of the One and of Spirit in relation to each other. The account of Neoplatonism in Windelband's History of Philosophy is short but very acute, and he traces with great ability the influence of Plotinus upon Christian philosophy. Of English works, by far the best is Mr. Whittaker's volume, The Neoplatonists (1901), an admirable survey of the subject. An independent contribution to an understanding of our author is the chapter on The Spiritualism of Plotinus in Mr. Benn's Greek Philosophers. Mr. Benn is not afraid to claim that in some respects Plotinus shows a real advance upon the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. But this writer declares roundly that the speculations of Plotinus are worthless, an ex cathedra pronouncement which no philosopher should have the hardihood to utter. Dr. Bigg's little volume on Neoplatonism (1895) is marked by the liberality, penetration, and humour which distinguish all his writings. Writing as a Christian theologian, he is a little inclined to treat the Pagan philosophers de haut en bas; but for all that, his account of the Neoplatonists is one of the best in English.

Of other English books on the subject I am unable to speak with the same satisfaction. Max Mller notices Plotinus in his lectures on Psychological

Religion; but he has been at so little pains to verify the information which he has gathered from other books, that he prints in extenso, with a few Greek words in brackets, a purely fictitious letter from Plotinus to his friend Flaccus, remarking that a man's real opinions may sometimes be discovered more accurately from his correspondence than from his published works. The letter is a cento of Plotinian phrases, compiled, without any intent to deceive, by R. A. Vaughan, in his Hours with the Mystics. Vaughan has not made it quite clear that the document is his own composition, and I have found four later writers caught in the trap thus inadvertently laid for them. This incident throws some light on the carelessness which critics have shown in dealing with the subject of these lectures. An American, Mr. Fuller, has published an essay on The Problem of Evil in Plotinus. The subject is not happily chosen, for Plotinus makes no attempt to hide his embarrassment in dealing with this insoluble problem, and throws out several suggestions which have no appearance of finality.

I wish that I could speak with a more whole-hearted appreciation of Dr. Edward Caird's chapters on our subject in the Gifford Lectures, entitled Theology in the Greek Philosophers, delivered at Glasgow in 190002. The book as a whole is as instructive as it is delightful, and it is no light matter to differ from one of the master-minds of his generation. But I must take my courage in both hands, and say that he seems to me to have attempted to stretch Plotinus on his Hegelian bed of Procrustes, and to have grievously distorted him in the process. When I read that the method of Plotinus involves a negation of the finite or determinate in all its forms; that he makes unity the direct object of thought; that for him religion ceases to be the consecration of life; that the world of pure intelligence is opposed in the sharpest way to the world of spatial externality and temporal change; that he develops to its extremist form the dualism of form and matter; that he escorts us to a region in which all that concerns the individual life is left out; that in the ascent spirit divests itself of one element of its life after another, I cannot resist the conclusion that Dr. Caird has in some important respects entirely misinterpreted the doctrine of the great Neo-platonist. I shall have to return to all the points raisedby his criticisms, in the course of my lectures. Here it will suffice to say that Dr. Caird takes no notice of the doctrine of ,

the creative activity of the higher principles, which is an essential part of this philosophy; that in criticising Plotinus he assumes that because in the material world no movement can take place without loss of energy on the part of the mover, the same law must hold in the spiritual world; and finally, that he virtually ignores the , the world of Spirit, which for Plotinus is the sphere of ultimate existence, and speaks as if the universe of Plotinus consisted of the supra-real One and the infra-real Matter, thus reducing to absurdity a system which assuredly deserves a different treatment. I do not mean to imply that Dr. Caird's treatment of Plotinus is throughout hostile and unsympathetic; that is far from being the case. Many of his strong points are generously acknowledged. But it is taken as proved that the philosophy is vitiated by certain fundamental errors which must prevent it from possessing much more than a historical interest. The errors and inconsistencies which Dr. Caird finds in him are of a kind which could not have escaped the notice of Plotinus himself, who was no lonely thinker, but lived in an atmosphere of free criticism, which he always encouraged. And in fact there is not one of the objections which cannot be either answered out of the Enneads, or proved to rest on a misunderstanding of their teaching.

I will conclude this introductory lecture by quoting a few laudatory estimates of Plotinus as a philosopher, by writers whose names carry weight. I will omit the eulogies of later members of his own school, with whom loyalty was a point of honour, and honorific epithets a matter of custom. While other Platonic teachers were deemed to have deserved the name of divine, the superlative most divine () was reserved for Plotinus. Augustine, who, as Grandgeorge has proved, shows acquaintance with each of the six Enneads, and quotes Plotinus by name five times, speaks of him in the following terms. The utterance of Plato, the most pure and bright in all philosophy, scattering the clouds of error, has shone forth most of all in Plotinus, the Platonic philosopher who has been deemed so like his master that one might think them contemporaries, if the length of time between them did not compel us to say that in Plotinus Plato lived again. The precise form of laudation is not happy; but the words leave no doubt that Augustine, at this early period of his career, was an enthusiastic admirer of Plotinus. In his later writings, Augustine speaks of the very acute and able men who

formed the school of Plotinus at Rome; regrets that some of them were led astray by curious arts (the theosophy and theurgy into which the Pagan revival betrayed the Neoplatonists in the fourth century), and thinks that if Plotinus and his friends had lived a little later, they would have changed a few words and phrases and become Christians, as many of the Platonists in our generation have done. In the De Civitate Dei he explains how little they would have had to change, though he criticises one or two of their doctrines sharply enough.

Of modern critics, Rville considers Plotinus one of the most vigorous thinkers that humanity has produced. Vacherot calls the Enneads la synthse la plus vaste, la plus riche, la plus forte peut-tre qui ait paru dans l'histoire de la philosophie. Harnack thinks that his main influence was in the creation of an ethical and religious mood, the highest and purest ever attained in antiquity. Whittaker calls him the greatest individual thinker between Aristotle and Descartes; Drews, the greatest metaphysician of antiquity. Benn, whose almost contemptuous estimate of the sytem has been quoted, admits that no other thinker has ever accomplished a revolution so immediate, so comprehensive, and of such prolonged duration. Eucken speaks of the Weltbeherrschenden Geist des Plotin. The words of Troeltsch, already referred to, are: In my opinion the sharper stress of the scientific and philosophical spirit in modern times has made the blend of Neoplatonism and New Testament Christianity the only possible solution of the problem at the present day, and I do not doubt that this synthesis of Neoplatonism and Christianity will once more be dominant in modern thought.

Encouraged by these opinions, I shall endeavour to put before you the teaching of this great man, in the hope that you will find it, as I have done, full of intellectual light and practical guidance. Nor am I without hope that, as we study him together, we shall find in him a message of calm and confidence for the troublous time through which we are passing. It is not worse than the period in which Plotinus himself lived. And yet he was able to breathe freely in the timeless and changeless world which is the background of the stage on which each generation struts for its brief hour and then is gone. He lives among the eternal Ideas; he never refers to the chaos which surrounded his

peaceful lecture-room. It is not callousness or indifference that makes him avert his eyes from the misfortunes of the Empire; he knows that the earth is full of darkness and cruel habitations; but he is convinced that evil is not the truth of things; he cannot regard it as having a substance of its own. Evil, he says, is not alone. By virtue of the nature of Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only. It appears necessarily, bound around with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold; and beneath these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of images of the Good and Beautiful for their remembrance. In another place he says, in words as true as they are consoling, Wickedness is always human, being mixed with something contrary to itself. It is human, and therefore not wholly evil and not wholly incurable; for the Soul of man comes from God, and cannot be utterly cut off from Him. And above the Soul of man is the great Soul, the Soul of the world. This, for Plotinus, as for Eastern thinkers down to Rabindranath Tagore, is no mere metaphor but a truth. The world has, or is, a Soul, which, as the Wisdom of Solomon says, sweetly ordereth all things. If our ears were attuned to the Divine voices we should, in the words of the great living poet and prophet of India, hear the music of the great I AM pealing from the grand organ of creation through its countless reeds in endless harmony. The Soul of man is bidden to take its part in the great hymn of praise which the world sings to its Creator. The body and its organs are the lyre on which the Soul discourses its music. We must take care of our lyre while we can; but when the lyre is broken or worn out, then, says Plotinus, we must sing without accompaniment. No losses or misfortunes, whether public or private, can hurt the hidden man of the heart, our real self; still less can they impair the welfare of the universal life in which our little lives are included. The real or spiritual world is a kingdom of values; and all that has value in the sight of the Creator is safe for evermore. Nothing that has real existence can ever perish. If Plotinus sometimes seems to speak a little heartlessly of such calamities as have lately befallen some unhappy communities of men and women, it is because his philosophy will not permit him to doubt for a moment that a noble life cannot possibly be extinguished by death, that the cause of justice

and righteousness cannot possibly suffer final defeat, and that no earth-born cloud can long prevent the beams which stream from the eternal fount of light from illuminating the dark places of this lower world. He bids us, as his master Plato had done, to flee hence to our dear country. But this flight is no shirking of our duties; it is, as he puts it, a being made like to God; and this we can achieve without any running away; for the spiritual world is all about and within us; there is not much between us and it. And when we have, in heart and mind, reached our dear country, all earthly troubles fade into insignificance. So it may be that others besides myself will find in this prophet of a sad time a helper in public and private sorrows, and that they will say of Plotinus what he said of his master Ammonius, This is the man I was looking for.

The Third Century

PLOTINUS is the one great genius in an age singularly barren of greatness. The third century is a dull and dark period, which has been avoided by historians for its poverty of material and lack of interest. It was a depressing age even to those who lived in it. When the death of Marcus Aurelius on the banks of the Save or Danube closed a long series of good emperors, even those who had ridiculed the imperial saint were saddened; all men had a misgiving that a troublous time was coming. Aurelius himself had been oppressed by the gathering gloom; he exhorts himself to courage and resignation, not to hopefulness. In the generations which followed, pessimism was prevalent. Cyprian, in rebutting the charge that the Christians are the cause why plague, famine, and drought ravage the world, says, You must know that the world has grown old, and does not remain in its former vigour. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the sun's warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields, the sailor on the seas, the soldier in camp, honesty in the market, justice in the courts, concord in friendships, skill in the arts, discipline in morals. This is the sentence passed upon the world, that everything which had a beginning should perish, that things which have reached maturity should grow old, the strong weak, the great small, and that after weakness and shrinkage should come dissolution. Tertullian finds in the state of the world ample corroboration of the sombre apocalyptic dreams in which he loves to indulge. This is indeed, he exclaims, the fin de sicle (ipsa clausula saeculi), which threatens horrible misfortunes to the whole world. Pagan literature is equally pessimistic. Dion, Lampridius, and Censorinus all lament the progressive decay of the world, which to Julian, in the fourth century, seemed to be at its last gasp. It would no doubt be possible to find parallels to those lugubrious vaticinations in the most flourishing periods of Greek and Roman culture. The idea that the world is deteriorating was very commonly held in antiquity, though the opposite belief in progress also finds frequent expression. But such a chorus of woe as rises from the literature of the third century had not been heard before.

It has been customary to blame both Christianity and Neoplatonism for encouraging and justifying this pessimistic temper. Pagan apologists were not slow to ascribe the decay of civilisation to the third race, the adherents of the new faith. Modern historians too, lamenting the wreck of the ancient culture and the destruction of its treasures in the stormy night of the Dark Ages, have felt a thrill of sympathy with the melancholy prophecy of a certain Antoninus, son of Eustathius, that soon a fabulous and formless darkness shall tyrannise over the fairest things on the earth. And as for Neoplatonism, was not Plotinus a mystic, and does not the mystic's soul dwell in a house with rich windows that exclude the light, and passages that lead to nothing? Did he not notoriously regard this world only as a good place to escape from?

As regards Christianity, subsequent history has shown the absurdity of attributing the world-weariness of any age or people to its influence. Christian idealism has taken many forms, but it would be difficult to name any period when it has quenched men's hopes or paralysed their energies. The true account of the matter is that the mysterious despondency which brooded over the Roman world at this epoch, attacked the new religion and infected it with a poison from which it was slow to recover. The Christian Church was no contributory cause of the disease. And if the tdium vit of the third century nearly swamped the buoyant ship of Christianity, it will be necessary for us to examine closely the other-worldliness of Plotinus, in order to disengage if possible the accidental from the essential in his obvious neglect of social life and its problems. Our object is to understand his philosophy, which, as I hope to show, has a permanent value far greater than is usually supposed. With this aim before us, we shall desire to give full weight to the conditions under which the Enneads were written, and in estimating the value of their moral teaching to consider rather the logical implications of the author's system than the want of emphasis on social and civic duties which we may observe in the work itself. This caution is the more necessary, because Plotinus follows what was really a literary convention of his age in avoiding any references to contemporary problems. There is nothing in the Enneads to indicate that their author was a subject of Decius and the Gordians; he might be writing in and for a timeless world. We may excuse him, for the age was not favourable to the study of political philosophy. The time was not yet ripe

for St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which was written when the death-throes of the first Latin Empire were heralding the yet wider sway of the second, the crowned and sceptred ghost of Caesarism which Hobbes beheld sitting amid the ruins of its ancient power.

It would no doubt be possible to discuss the philosophy of Plotinus as a thing independent of the date and locality in which it appeared. Mysticism, above all other types of human thought, is nearly the same always and everywhere. Plotinus would perhaps have preferred that his work should be so dealt with. But there is much in Neoplatonism besides the mystical element, much that can only be understood when it is replaced in its historical setting. And if we are to treat Plotinus as the last of the great Greek philosophers, as indeed he was, we must try to picture to ourselves the strange and uncongenial influences with which Hellenism had to contend in the third century, and take account of the inevitable modifications which Platonism underwent in such an atmosphere. A thinker may be in advance of his contemporaries, but not of his age. The great man gives voice to the deepest thought of his own epoch.

The salient features of this periodthe fusion of religious cults, the inroads of Orientalism, the growth of superstition, the reverential deference to antiquity, the profound but half unconscious modification of the older pagan ethics, and the intense individualism of the contemplative life are all phenomena which have their explanation in the uprooting of nationalities which resulted from the Roman state-policy, and still more from the Roman slave-system. The racial factor had a decisive influence in the religious movements under the empire, and helped largely to bring about the defeat of those traditions and aspirations with which Neoplatonism, after the death of Plotinus, more and more allied itself.

A very few words will suffice to indicate the nature of the imperial government. When Septimius Severus lay dying at York in 211, he flattered himself that he was leaving in profound tranquillity an empire which he hadfound torn with dissensions of every kind. He was the last emperor for eighty years who died in his bed. His sons, whose concord and brotherly love were celebrated on coins and commemorated in an annual festival, agreed no better than Cain and Abel. Caracalla was assassinated after a reign

of six years; Macrinus, his murderer and successor, fourteen months later. The next emperor was a young Syrian priest, who for four years exhibited in his own person the worst aberrations of unclean nature-worship. Next the army appointed a boy named Alexander, who called himself Severus and reigned for thirteen years, devoting his time to the practice of a vague eclectic religiosity, in which Apollonius and Jesus, Orpheus and Abraham, divided the honours of his chapel. When he too was murdered by the soldiers, a period of anarchy set in. There were seven emperors in fourteen years (235249). It was during this chaos that Plotinus arrived at Rome (in 244). Then came Decius and a futile conservative reaction, which as usual took the form of a persecution of the Christians. His death in battle with the Gothsno emperor had before fallen under the enemy's sword in Roman territoryushered in another period of wild confusion, during which, an emperor died the captive of the Persian king. One able ruler, Aurelian, appeared, and was soon murdered. His reign witnessed a bloody pitched battle in Rome itself. The Illyrian emperors, of whom the last and greatest was Diocletian, restored order by bringing to an end the lawless rule of the army, and accepting in principle the Sultanate towards which all indications had been pointing since the time of the Antonines.

A vigorous nation can survive a long period of revolutions and bad government, conditions to which the ancient world was only too well accustomed. But the two great races of antiquity were no longer vigorous. The system of city-states is a forcing-house of genius, but terribly wasteful of the best elements in the population. From the fifth century B.C. onwards, war, massacre, and banishment steadily eliminated the most virile members of the Greek cities. Originally a very prolific race, as is proved by the extent of its colonisation, the Hellenic stock dwindled rapidly. The Spartiates became almost extinct. Polybius speaks of Greece generally as an empty country, and by the time of Plutarch large tracts of land were absolutely deserted. The decline was in quality as well as quantity; by the time of Cicero the Greeks had already ceased to be a handsome people. Complete racial exhaustion had practically destroyed the Hellenes before the period which we are considering.

The same blight began to attack Italy in the second century before Christ. The ravages of the Social War and the proscriptions only aggravated a disease which would have run its course without them, and which even peace and good government could not cure. Marcus Aurelius settled large bands of Marcomanni in Italy, a proceeding which would be inconceivable if tracts of good land had not been lying fallow. In the fourth century not only the country but the towns were almost deserted. Bologna, Modena, Piacenza, and many other cities in Northern Italy were largely in ruins. Samnium remained the desert which Sulla had left it; Apulia contained only sheep-walks and a few farm-slaves. Rome itself seems to have shrunk by more than one-half between Augustus and Septimius Severus. This decline, which was not caused by want, but mainly by a deficiency of births, received a sudden acceleration from the great plagues of the second and third centuries. In a healthy society the losses due to pestilence, like those due to war, are quickly made good by a spontaneous rise in the birthrate; but in the Roman empire the loss was probably permanent.

The exceptions to the universal depopulation are found, not in the Romanised provinces of Gaul and Spain, which seem to have dwindled, though less rapidly than Greece and Italy, but in the Semitic East. The Romans themselves spoke with wonder of the fertility of African and Egyptian women; but Egypt was very full under the Ptolemys, and the high birth-rate was probably balanced by a high death-rate. The regions where the numbers increased were, it seems, those inhabited by Jews and other Semites, and those colonised by Germans. The steady influx from these fertile races seemed at times to have stopped the decline, so that Tertullian and Aristides speak in exaggerated language of the great abundance of population. The multiplication of the Jews, in spite of frequent massacres, is one of the problems of history. Germans penetrated everywhere, and were not kept down by massacre; they probably formed a large proportion of the serfs who were beginning to take the place of rural slaves in many parts. The army was chiefly composed of them: the fact that the minimum height for the infantry was fixed, in 367, at 5 feet 7 inches, and 5 feet 10 inches for crack regiments, shows that recruits were no longer expected or desired from the Mediterranean races.

The general result of these changes was that in the third century the traditions and civilisation of Greece and Rome were guarded almost entirely by a population of alien origin. One curious difference was that while the old Romans were almost vegetarians, and temperate wine-drinkers, the new Romans lived by preference on beef, and swilled great quantities of beer. In more important matters there was a great change from the second to the third century. Till the period of the Antonines ancient morality shows an unbroken continuity, and in certain respects differed widely from our own. The most remarkable instance is the toleration extended throughout antiquity to the love of boys, which was practised openly and with hardly any sense of degradation in most parts of the Grco-Roman world. This vice was not imported from the East, but spread to the Persian empire from Greece. It appeared later than the Homeric Age, quite recently, according to Plato, and fell into complete discredit only after Christian and Northern ethical ideas made themselves felt. Not to linger over a disagreeable subject, I will only call attention to the contrast between the pious thanksgiving of Marcus Aurelius, that he touched neither Benedicta nor Theodotus, making no difference between mistress and minion, and the angry disgust of Plotinus, when a paper justifying this practice was read in his presence. In some respects the change was for the worse. The barbarisation of the empire is shown by the increasing brutality of the criminal law. Torture became the commonest mode of examining witnesses, even free men. The avenging flames, a penalty almost unknown to pagan antiquity, became the prescribed punishment for every offence which the government found inconvenient or difficult to stop. The advent of the Dark Ages was deferred only by the amazing cast-iron despotism of Diocletian and his successors, which saved the empire from a welter of savagery at the cost of establishing a bureaucratic caste-system which bound every man to his father's calling, and gradually sucked the life-blood of the people by insatiable and unscientific taxation. Throughout the storms of invasion, revolution and civil war, the large landowners somehow maintained their colossal fortunes. The latifundia rivalled in extent the largest haciendas and estancias in Mexico and the Argentine Republic. The six magnates who in Nero's time owned half the province of Africa must have had millions of acres apiece. These vast estates were very carelessly farmed,

and as the depopulation advanced land became almost valueless. An astonishing decree of Pertinax (A.D. 193), which applied to Italy as well as the provinces, allowed anyone to 'squat on uncultivated land, whether in private ownership or belonging to the fiscus, and to acquire complete proprietary rights on condition of farming it. The senatorial class, forbidden to govern, to trade, and finally even to fight, were condemned to a life of useless dilettantism. They read and wrote, or looked after their property in an easy-going fashion. The main part of their capital consisted of slaves, whose labours supplied all the needs of the great house, and who could be let out to various employers; and of flocks and herds, which roamed over the vast sheep-runs in charge of slave herdsmen and shepherds. New fortunes were acquired chiefly by inheritance from wealthy bachelors, by usurious money-lending, or by the pickings of office, which for an unscrupulous official might be very large. The small proprietors were easily bought out, and the luckless middle-class were the chief victims of the fiscus.

The decay of culture in the third century is even more deplorable than the disappearance of the old races. The barbarians brought new blood into the empire, but literature, art, and science, which were born with the Greeks, died with them. After the death of Hadrian, a Sahara of the higher intellect spreads its dreary wastes over the empire. Under the enlightened rule of the Antonines law and grammar alone seem to flourish. Suetonius is an entertaining gossip who in an affected age has the sense to attempt no style at all. Aulus Gellius, the epitomator, is a typical product of an age of timid pedants. With him ends classical Latin. The historian of Latin literature now turns his eyes to Africa, where the accomplished rhetorician Fronto is attempting toregenerate the language by reviving the prose of the second century B.C., and to the barbarous jewellery of the decadent Apuleius, the Huysmans of the ancient world, in whom the elocutio novella, that strange mixture of pre-classical Latinity and medieval sentiment, reaches its highest excellence. The swan-song of Latin poetry is the Pervigilium Veneris, with its singularly pathetic close, in which the Muse bids her tearful farewell to the language of Ennius, Lucretius, and Virgil.

Illa cantat; nos tacemus; quando ver venit meum? Quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam?

There was no second spring for Latin poetry, though Ausonius and Claudian were to make the first renaissance not undistinguished. In the third century the chief writers in Latin are Christians, some of them, like Tertullian and Cyprian, followers of the African tradition, others, like the feebler Minucius Felix and Lactantius, would-be Ciceronians. Tertullian, in spite of his unquestionable power, is a sinister figure, with his gloomy ferocity and scorn of the old civilisation. After reading him we can understand, what sometimes seems hard to account for, the extreme unpopularity of Christianity at a time when the moral condition of the Church was only a little below its best. Cyprian was an able administrator, with a comparatively chastened style. Commodian, though hardly a poet, had the courage to write as he talked, in a Latin which is beginning to pass into the language of medieval Italy. The great lawyers remain; and we must not forget that the first half of the third century is the golden age of Roman law. The names of Ulpian and Papinian do honour to their time, and their work marks a real progress in justice and humanity, before the barbarism of the later empire set in.

The list of Greek writers is far longer and more respectable than of Latin. A revival of Hellenism had been one of the most prominent facts of the second century. The victory of Vespasian with his Syrian legions over his western rival was perhaps an early indication that the centre of gravity was soon to pass eastwards, though the roll of eminent Spaniards closes only with Trajan. Plutarch, Dion Chrysostom, Herodes Atticus, Maximus of Tyre, Arrian, and Lucian, are among the chief names of a real though rather superficial Greek revival. It bears all the features of a revival, in its artificiality, its conscientious imitativeness and reliance on authority, and in its short duration. But the achievement of Athenus, Dion Cassius, and Pausanias, followed by Herodian, Longinus, and Philostratus, is by no means contemptible, and Christianity now contributes its share to literature in Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Methodius. In spite of political disturbances, a cultivated society existed in the capital. It included littrateurs of all kinds, poets or poetasters, rhetoricians, grammarians, critics, philosophers. There were also numerous

portrait-painters, and architects and engineers capable of undertaking large works. The art was imitative, but of a fair quality till the middle of the century, when the coins begin to show a strange deterioration. The bas-reliefs in the arch of Septimius Severus are vigorously executed. But, speaking generally, there was stagnation or retrogression everywhere, except in law, religion, and religious philosophy.

The Religious Revival

The revival of the religious sentiment, which Augustus had desired in vain to see and had laboured in vain to encourage, was now a swiftly rising flood. Lucian's Voltairean impiety was a belated product even under the Antonines; he would have been impossible half a century later. The causes are obscure. Chief among them was probably the consciousness of spiritual sickness and alienation from God, which made men and women feel the need of a physician. As Kirchner says, the rich fullness of the world of appearance had lost its charm; men now cared only for the pure universal and the pure individual. The movement took many forms, There was a sheer conservative reaction, which looked back to the gods of Olympus. There was a turning towards a religion of pure inwardness; there was also a growth of theosophy and magic. Above all, the religion of the Hellenistic period found its characteristic expression in the cult-brotherhood (). The oracles, too, were no longer dumb. Communion with God in some form or other was desired by all. A very prominent feature in the religion of this period was the deliberate mixture of cults originally quite distinct. It was taught that the gods of different nations are all manifestations of the same Divine principle. In many cases the confusion of races, each with its own religious traditions, made interdenominationalism not only easy but necessary, as we observe in some parts of the United States in OUT own day. Toleration and fusion were the result, all the more readily because most of the old cults, in their traditional forms, were by no means adequate to the higher religious and moral needs of the age.

It is not easy in this period to separate the religious syncretism from the philosophic, for philosophy had now become the intellectual expression of personal religion. But it will be most convenient to consider the philosophical genesis of Neoplatonism in a separate chapter, and to give here a brief sketch of the religious condition of the empire.

The Roman pantheon was densely populated before the immigration of Oriental deities began. There are more gods than human beings, as Pliny the Elder and Petronius assure us in the first century. But the Roman gods were invertebrate creatures, shadowy abstractions which had not enough flesh and blood to make a mythology. No one ascribed any definite personality to Domiduca, Volupia, or Pertunda. But the feast-days, which were as numerous as the festas of Catholicism, gave abundant opportunities for little pious functions, with prayer and sacrifice, followed by a meal on the sacred flesh. Rome was full of dignified ecclesiastics, with ancient titles, and revenues sufficient to allow of frequent and sumptuous banquets. The numerous benefit-clubs and trade-unions had a religious basis, and the members attended a periodical church-parade in honour of the deity who was the special protector of their calling. Private and domestic piety flourished in well-ordered households, and the time-honoured religious ceremonies no doubt filled an important place in the country life which Pater describes in Marius the Epicurean. This piety was prompted by very different feelings from those which dictated conformity with the established and official cult of the reigning emperor, who could make it more dangerous to swear falsely by his genius than by all the other gods in the pantheon. There was nothing revolting either to Greeks or Asiatics (except Jews) in paying Divine honours to a man. The apotheosis of the ruler of the civilised world was a matter of course. Vespasian no doubt had been conscious of the comic side of his approaching deification (vae! puto deus fio); and Caracalla, after murdering his brother Geta, could jest upon the promotion which he had secured for him. This complimentary worship of dead Csars was so little serious or so little religious that the Christians must have seemed to their contemporaries merely obstinate or unpatriotic for objecting to it. But recalcitrance was always dangerous, and the living emperor was now beginning to collect the insignia of a real theocratic ruler.Diocletian compelled those who had

interviews with him to prostrate themselves as before a god. Long before this, each divinised emperor and imperial family had their own association of worshippers, and membership of these guilds added interest and a sense of importance to the life of a middle-class citizen. Paganism, like Catholicism, knew how to make religion pleasant and interesting.

Strictly, it was not the emperor, but his genius or guardian-angel, who must be propitiated and by no means blasphemed. Every man had a genius, every woman a Juno. This piece of old Roman folk-lore was now so much mixed up with speculation about disembodied souls and spirits that the fuller consideration of it must be postponed to a later chapter. Apuleius is a valuable source of information on the spiritualistic beliefs which were now becoming almost universal. Christianity was not unaffected by them, but it did a great service by discountenancing magic and theurgy. The school of Plotinus was less successful in resisting the popular craving: it was at last deeply infected by this kind of superstition, which Plotinus himself disliked but could not wholly repudiate, since nature, for him, was a web of mysterious sympathies and affinities. The genius was properly a man's higher self, his spiritual ego. It is therefore significant, as showing how fluid was the conception of personality at this time, that families, cities, trades, had their genius, much as the individual soul might be held to be subsumed under a higher unit, and ultimately under the universal Soul. This vagueness about personality made the notion of a celestial hierarchy easy and acceptable. Maximus of Tyre is fond of regarding the spirits as messengers and interpreters between earth and heaven, and Celsus, the Roman official, compares them to proconsuls or satraps, deputy regents of the supreme ruler. Plotinus himself believed in these intermediate beings, and so did the Christians, for whom the dmons of paganism became demons in our sense.

In an age when the Semitic element in the population was gaining every year on the Mediterranean stocks, the East, always the cradle of religions, was certain to have a great influence both on belief and worship. Rome was almost equalled in population, wealth, and culture by Alexandria and Antioch, and a considerable fraction even of the Roman population came from Syria and Egypt. In the army the Eastern gods were the most popular objects of

worship; inscriptions in their honour are found in the military stations of England, Germany, and North Africa. The Eastern religions brought with them their priests, not state-officials like the higher Roman ecclesiastics, who might hold many secular posts in combination with their sacerdotium, but a dedicated caste with no other interests except the service of their god, and a recognised obligation to proselytise. These priests ranged from the often saintly servants of Mithra or Isis to the disreputable charlatans who perambulated the country-side with an image, a donkey, and a band, and collected coppers from the gaping crowd.

The four countries from which the most important Oriental religions came were Egypt, Syria, Phrygia, and Palestine. We will consider them in turn.

The Egyptian Religion

At Rome, the cult of Isis was the most important among the foreign religions. Even in the first century her worship was widespread in Italy, as is testified by numerous inscriptions at Pompeii. For Minucius Felix the Egyptian gods are already Roman. At first looked down upon, the Egyptian goddess had become fashionable long before the arrival of Plotinus at Rome. Commodus, while emperor, took part with shaven head in her ceremonies, and carried the image of Anubis. Caracalla showed special favour to the Egyptian rites, and built splendid temples to Isis at Rome. The eclectic Alexander Severus was as learned in the theology of Egypt as in that of other countries.

As the goddess of fertility, Isis combined some of the attributes of Venus, Ceres, and other Roman deities; she was also in a special degree the protectress of commerce and navigation. Sailors and women were equally devoted to the goddess who brought ships safe into port, and children into the world. But she was also the vision of the initiated mystic. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, full of foulness as it is, leads up to a passionate prayer of devotion to her, as she reveals herself to her pious votaries.

In earlier times the shrines of Isis had an equivocal reputation. The goddess was popular with the demimonde, and her worship can have had little

connection with moral purity. But such scandals are not recorded in the third century, when indeed they would have hardly have been tolerated. In our period the worship of Isis was organised in a manner very like that of the Catholic Church. There was a kind of pope, with priests, monks, singers, and acolytes. The images of the Madonna were covered with true or false jewels, and her toilette was dutifully attended to every day. Daily matins and evensong were said in the chief temples. The priests were tonsured and wore white linen vestments. There were two great annual festivals, in the spring and autumn. The autumn festival was the occasion of public grief and joy over the death and resurrection of Osiris-Sarapis. The processions and ceremonies described by Apuleius and others were ingeniously contrived to excite curiosity, stimulate devotional feeling, and gratify the sthetic sense. For the mystic, Isis represented the deepest mysteries of life. Proclus makes her say, I am that which has been, is, and will be. My garment none has lifted.

The worship of Isis was closely connected with that of the dog-headed Anubis, long popular in Egypt; of Harpocrates the son of Isis and Osiris, and above all of Sarapis, who more and more took the place of the old Egyptian god, Osiris. Sarapis was a deity of many attributes; he had a great reputation for miraculous cures, and invalids often slept in his temples. He ended as a solar deity of omnipotent majesty, and as the great god of Alexandria threw Isis somewhat into the shade. Caracalla paid him the compliment of dedicating to him the sword with which he had killed his brother Geta, as South-Italian assassins have been known to offer to the Virgin the knife which they have used successfully on a private enemy.

Isis was a suffering and merciful mother-goddess, who longed to ease human troubles. Her worship had a miraculous element for the vulgar, a spiritual theology for the cultured, and an attractive ritual for the average worshipper. No other religion practised faith-healing, by passing the night in temples (), on so large a scale. This Egyptian religion never inculcated a very robust or elevated morality. Its power lay in its charm, and in the hope of immortality which was always strong in the Egyptian religion. There is a famous passage in an ancient Egyptian text relating to the worship of Osiris,

which speaks of the loyal votary of the god after death. As truly as Osiris lives, shall he live; as truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die; as truly as Osiris is not annihilated, shall he not be annihilated. The initiate is to share eternally in the divine life; nay, he does already share it. He becomes Osiris.

Phrygian Cults

The worship of the Magna Mater had been known and recognised in Attica as early as the fourth century B.C., and at Rome as early as the second Punic war, and was patronised by the aristocracy, though no Roman was allowed to enrol himself among the eunuch priests of the Asiatic goddess. King Attalus at this time presented the senate with the black aerolite, formerly kept at Pessinus and then at Pergamum, which was supposed to be the abode of the Idan Mother. The grateful Romans, at last rid of Hannibal, erected a temple to her on the Palatine, and ordained an annual holy week in her honour. The Phrygian religion was wild and violent, as befitted a climate which produces extremes of heat and cold. It included such primitive elements as the worship of stones and trees, and at once horrified and fascinated the West by its wild orgies at the spring festival, which culminated in the self-mutilation of devotees. But it had also an ascetic order of mendicant friars, and mysteries, of which little is known. Till the beginning of the empire, the Phrygian worship was kept under strict control, and attracted little notice except on the festival days when the foreign priests marched in procession through the streets. But Claudius, according to a second-century authority, removed the restrictions on the worship of Cybele and Attis, and Roman citizens began to be chosen as archigalli. Henceforth the Phrygian worship received a measure of official support not extended to other Oriental religions. The festal processions were very imposing, and the death and resurrection of Attis was regarded as a sacrament and pledge of human immortality. The worshippers sang, Take courage, ye initiated, because the god is saved: to you also will come salvation from your troubles.

Cumont thinks that in the worship of Sabazius, the Phrygian Jupiter or Dionysus, closely connected with Cybele, some Jewish influence may be

traced. The religion of the Magna Mater was certainly changed by partial fusion with the Persian cult, of which more will be said presently. The baptism of blood (taurobolium) was, according to some, introduced into the Mithraic worship from the cult of the Great Mother; though it is perhaps more probable that it belonged originally to the cult of Anahita, a Persian goddess. In the sacred feasts of Attis we can trace the familiar change from an agape to a sacrament in which the flesh and blood of the god were consumed. In the fourth century this plastic cult even tried for a rapprochement with Christianity. Augustine tells that priests of Cybele (or Mithra) used to say, Et ipse pileatus Christianus est, even the god with the cap (Attis or Mithra) is a Christian.

Mithra.

Lucian, in one of his Voltairean Dialogues of the Gods, makes Momus ask contemptuously, Who is this Mithra, with the sleeves and tiara, who knows no Greek and cannot even understand when one drinks his health? But in point of fact Mithra was a parvenu only in the West. He was a very old god of the rising sun, who had been degraded to a subordinate place by the worshippers of Ahuramazda, but who refused to remain in the shade, and advanced rapidly in popular favour among the Persians. The Persian religion was always disliked by the Greeks; the deadly rivalry of the two races is enough to account for this. The West was less prejudiced. And Mithra acquired characteristics which made him as welcome in Europe as in Asia. As god of the sun, he claimed affinity with the nature-deities with whom the Greeks and Romans were familiar, and as patron of life and giver of immortality he appealed strongly to the harassed subjects of the empire. While Isis attracted chiefly women and peaceable citizens, Mithra was the god of soldiers and adventurers. Plutarch says that the Romans first became acquainted with this religion through the Cilician pirates whom Pompey subdued in 67 B.C. For Plutarch, Mithra is still a barbarian god. It was in the time of the Antonines that he gained recognition as a deity of importance at Rome. Marcus Aurelius installed him on the Vatican, where St. Peter's now stands. From this time he became a favourite of the legionaries, who have

scattered votive monuments in his honour over every province where they encamped, and also of the slave-class, for reasons less easy to determine.

The Mithraic symbol is familiar to all frequenters of sculpture museums. The god, in the guise of a young Phrygian wearing the national cap, a short tunic, and a mantle floating in the wind, plunges his dagger into the neck of a bull. The scene is complete only when several other figures are present; two young Phrygians, each holding a lighted torch, the one upright and the other reversed; five symbolic animalsa crow or owl, a scorpion gripping the bull from beneath, a dog lapping t